171 Responses

An example of FPP mentality I saw was Labour voters attacking the Greens for splitting the left-wing vote and allowing National to win some electorates.

Of course there are a group of Labour supporters who don't really recognise the right of the Greens to exist and think Labour should be the only-party of the Left. I'm not sure how much that hinders the two parties cooperating.

Politics today is not really about long-term friendships except with donors. Possibly more accurate to say that National don't have principles in that sense, they are the embodiment of neoliberal philosophy. What's in it for them, right now, the end.

Labour have long-term enmities with both The Greens and Aotearoa's ruling class which would make things difficult if they got into power and were not sufficiently subservient. You see this dramatically in Venezuela, but the mining super-profit tax in Australia was a more local demonstration (mining companies very publically said "we will buy our way out of this tax with a PR campaign... and the Australian public said "that's a great idea, we're with you 100%"... because the public really are as stupid as the very worst stereotype tries to make them look).

I'm with Kumara Republic above, except that I think "active fact-checking & strong transparency" won't work because the Trumpian media go along with the "gut feel" approach to modern life. Facts are boring, no-one cares they keep telling us, and that is working. Finding a way to beat that is IMO the first step. NFI how, sadly.

I'm kinda happy with that, because I see the more important split as being between the brown parties and the green ones. So The Greens and to some extent TOP are greenish, and Labour are less brown than National. But IME many Labour voters get quite upset with that approach, even the ones who are willing to let The Greens exist.

FWIW I have green-ish friends in Labour who are still angry 20-odd years after most of the Labour environmental faction split off to form a separate party. {eyeroll}, that's why we have MMP now. Suggesting that the best way to eliminate the Green Party would be a coalition hasn't previously got much traction, but maybe now National has done that to three of its "partners" they might see how it works? OTOH, they might correctly fear that the more organised party who's been more effective in opposition might execute a reverse takeover once in power?

One of the important benefits of proportional representation is precisely that splitting or combining of parties doesn't make much difference, so the whole concept of 'largest party' is about purely arbitrary boundaries.

Largest coalition matters, and obviously there's more negotiation overhead in putting together a coalition with more parties, but largest party just isn't a thing.

And, operationally, what would a "largest party" convention even mean? National should negotiate with Labour before they negotiate with NZ First, and with the Greens before ACT?

I’d agree that that there’s a strong (growing?) appetite for this in a lot of Anglosphere nations, though I think support for the monarchy is a bit of a red herring in this context. The British monarchy have been largely powerless ceremonial figureheads since the Hanoverian settlement.

What I think is going on here is the bedding in of a kind of pop Social Darwinism, which blames the victims of neoliberalism for their own demise and, conversely, regards the trappings of material success earned through market activity as signs of spiritual election and moral authority. And of course, Social Darwinism acquires some pretty malign racialist aspects in a former colony of settlement.

I don’t doubt that this is part of the psychology underlying at least some people’s apparently “visceral” distaste for beneficiaries or their refusal to extend any form of empathy towards the sick, the homeless, or children born into poverty. This form of state-administered violence towards the bodies of the “weak” is part of the unfolding logic of Social Darwinist settler neoliberalism.

What I think is going on here is the bedding in of a kind of pop Social Darwinism, which blames the victims of neoliberalism for their own demise and, conversely, regards the trappings of material success earned through market activity as signs of spiritual election and moral authority.

I'm thinking Chloe Swarbrick. With her hipster/preppie dress style, Auckland mayoral race cred and straightforward way of drilling down to the heart of the matter, she is the new Infant Phenomenon in waiting.

"Considering National got fairly close to what it did in 2014 and certainly more than it did in 2008, I'm not sure the "National led government lost". The Nat's constituency seems to be fairly steady in their support"

Nats down 2.1 points (2014 Election Night vs 2017 Election Night)

Right Bloc (Govt Parties + Cons) down 6.5 points

So in the context of the collapse of the 4% Conservatives (whose supporters strongly favoured a National led government - NZES) = the Nats Party-Vote should've soared rather than fallen by 2 points (that's if you want to argue they've essentially held their own)

"Other than the Maori seats, where was the swing to Labour that you'd expect in a "mood for change" climate?"

Bizarre thing to say when Labour's Party-Vote soared by 11 points

"But NZ First are split on which way their constituents would want them to go. That break down is: 46% want them to go with National. 41% Labour and 13% want them in opposition.This would change the result to 51.15 vs 44.78"

Omerta rules...I note that the National Family's consigliere Wayne Eagleson is abandoning ship - is it because Bill ain't 'mongrel' enough or because Eagleson can see the writing on the wall?Or is he taking one for the team, to smooth the way for desperate National / NZ First 'negotiations'?

Time to reduce MMP threshold to 2% and make broad (2-5 party) coalitions the norm.

Then, the required skills for politicians would be: collaboration, communication, relationship-building, authenticity and longer, more enduring political cooperation that outlives individuals.

Politicians without these skills would slowly disappear to be replaced by those who embrace a newer, more collaborative and collective style of politics, less inclined to look after the interests of a few paid for by subsidy from the many.

What I think is going on here is the bedding in of a kind of pop Social Darwinism, which blames the victims of neoliberalism for their own demise and, conversely, regards the trappings of material success earned through market activity as signs of spiritual election and moral authority. And of course, Social Darwinism acquires some pretty malign racialist aspects in a former colony of settlement.

The same thing can be seen among rabid Trumpniks who couldn't care less about their Dear Leader's economic protectionism & nuclear bull-in-a-china-shop Tweets, but do care "bigly" about black and brown "welfare queens sponging off their hard-earned wages". Is welfare in NZ only as controversial as it is because of racial undercurrents?

Just randomly on enrolment, is there any evidence or investigation out there of whether there's a significant effect of the jury service system on enrolment figures?

It seems odd to me that people who try to skip the potential stress and often life-churning turmoil of a jury summons typically get sneered at, chased and threatened by the MoJ... while people who accept it sometimes still have to accept serious inconvenience and a pay-cut compared with their usual living expenses. But if you avoid putting yourself on the list from which juries are selected, whilst illegal, it's just barely illegal. It's so barely illegal, in fact, that if the Electoral Commission ever began prosecuting someone for refusing to enrol (has this ever happened?), the law states that the previous failure to enrol is immediately forgotten and ignored if the person enrols then and there.

The contrast seems to create a significant incentive for people to not enrol, especially if they don't really care about voting. Maybe it's not obvious to all, but I bet it must occur to people who've already had a bad time in jury service.

Time to reduce MMP threshold to 2% and make broad (2-5 party) coalitions the norm.

Then, the required skills for politicians would be: collaboration, communication, relationship-building, authenticity and longer, more enduring political cooperation

Yep, I've been thinking likewise. A design that provides an incentive structure to extend consensus on common ground. It would reflect the actual diversity within Aotearoa, creating an enhanced sense of political equity. The progressive part of the Green vote that migrated to TOP would not have been wasted.

Aside from a lower threshold I'd really like to see an alternative vote situation, so people could party-vote for a small party they really really want, but have the safety of being able to have their vote reassigned if it didn't reach the threshold. That reduces the problem of new parties struggling to get support from people worried about nothing except their votes being wasted.

The main down-side, I guess, is adding complication to the voting process. There seem to be enough people around who struggle to understand the difference between the two votes the already get. Adding a third probably wouldn't help with that.

Also preferential voting in electorates would be optimal. It'd not stop big parties from instructing their supporters how to vote, but it'd make it much harder for them to mess up electorates when they can't count on opposition votes being split. No party should be incentivised to withdraw their candidates whom some voters prefer merely because too many votes might result in a worse overall outcome.

Neither of these was considered or recommended by the 2012 MMP review so I can't see much hope for them.

So how do people of no fixed abode get enrolled to vote? And do overseas citizens have an electorate to vote in if they don’t have a current address here in New Zealand?

Bearing in mind this is just an idea and might be horribly flawed ...

I don't see any reason to need a fixed abode at all to vote for a party. You'd already be enrolled assuming enrollment was automatic at age 18 or say when you got residence.

You'd only need a fixed abode if you wanted to vote in an electorate.

My guess is voting in electorates would drop significantly with this system and that might cause issues.

And overseas voters would automatically get a party vote. I'm not sure they would need and electorate vote would they? I guess if they owned a home they were planning on returning to they could nominate that as their address and electorate if they wanted to do that.

So how do people of no fixed abode get enrolled to vote? And do overseas citizens have an electorate to vote in if they don’t have a current address here in New Zealand?

You can enrol with the residential address where you last lived for (off the top of my head) two months, even if that was ages ago. You can also use your parents' address, or somewhere like a City Mission as your mailing address. The EC's guideline is that your residential address should be the place you think of as home, even if you don't live there most of the time.

We had quite a few voters furious to find that, since the last time they'd voted, they'd been disenrolled. In most cases, this would be because they moved, didn't update their address, their first 'check your details are correct' pack went to their old address, and was returned to sender.

No need for a third vote. That's essentially STV. Since the Aussies use that for the Senate vote, and a bastardised version for the lower house vote (NOT a good option), any argument about complexity is void. I haven't heard of any Aussies complaining about not being able to understand this voting thing.

Alas, I think the mystery initials put people off - it needs a cute name like "Duckworth-Lewis".

And regarding the point about how much racism is embedded in people's attitudes towards welfare recipients, I'd say it's a pretty damn big chunk. And another chunk is simple classism - growing up poor and Pakeha 30 odd years ago (before the worst of the welfare "reforms") certainly demonstrated that aspect to me adequately.